Pages

Thursday, 8 July 2010

I have recently setup a OpenFiler server at home. The main reason was because I have maxed out all local hard drive connections on my main PC. I researched abit and it came down to FreeNAS or OpenFiler.

I opted for OpenFiler because I have used FreeNAS before and thought it was great except for the fact that it was based on FreeBSD, an OS I'm not that familiar with. OpenFiler is based on Linux and has a reputation for having higher transfer rates than FreeNAS. I was thinking of using iSCSI so I went with OpenFiler

The setup of OpenFiler was quite straight forward but here are a few tips that may help people new to the system.

Problem:When using the Web Interface for OpenFiler, the Volumes page does not load up

Issue:This is a known issue that OpenFiler has with floppy disk controllers.

Solution:Disable the floppy controller in the BIOS--

Problem:Hard drives with partitions from other operating systems are detected in OpenFiler but cannot be used for storage.

Issue:OpenFiler must format all hard drives before they can be used as storage

Solution:Run the following command to format the hard drives that cannot be used

parted /dev/hdX mklabel gpt

Where /dev/hdX is the name of the hard drive--

Problem:Client computers using Microsoft iSCSI Initiator to connect to iSCSI targets on the OpenFiler server get the following error when trying to discover targets.

"CHAP secret given does not conform to the standard. Please see system event log for more information."

Issue:The password used for CHAP Authentication is not the correct length. The password needs to be between 12 and 16 characters.

Problem:Set the CHAP Authentication password in OpenFiler so that it is between 12 and 16 characters.